New Delhi: It is extremely unnerving that India cannot fight a war beyond 15-20 days due to crippling shortages in its ammunition stocks, as the latest report of the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India has revealed.
This must ring alarm bells in the corridors of power as also in defence circles in the country but while the gravity of the situation in terms of operational preparedness had been stressed even in the CAG report in 2012, precious little seems to have been done to wake up to the reality. This doubtlessly poses a huge threat to the country’s security but it is equally disconcerting that such vital facts and the interpretation thereon are allowed to be let out in the public domain despite the obvious danger that this would jeopardize the country’s defences.
It is common knowledge that during the erstwhile decade-long UPA rule, essential defence purchases were postponed for years because decision-making was at its lowest ebb. The backlog was so much that it will take years of aggressive purchasing to come back to combat-readiness. The then Defence Minister, A.K. Antony, was so scared of getting embroiled in corruption scams that he chose not to order many essential armaments and sat over files for long on augmenting and modernizing the armed forces.
General V.K. Singh, who was the Army chief for some time during UPA rule and is now a Union minister in the NDA government, disturbed a hornet’s nest when, in a letter to the then Prime Minister he pointed to the appalling state of defence preparedness. The latest CAG report has also bared the fact that the Tejas light combat fighter aircraft is just 35 per cent indigenous and that it falls short on 53 per cent of its technical parameters. While such info needed to be put together for official purposes, it is debatable whether it should have been put out in the public domain. That India is deficient in electronic warfare capabilities is also revealed in the CAG report.
Elaborating on its surmise that defence preparedness is alarmingly low, the CAG report says that while stocks of 125 of 170 types of ammunition are not enough for even 20 days, stocks of 85 types of ammunition especially for tanks and artillery are adequate for only 10 days. While all this is shocking in the extreme and will require herculean efforts in the next few years to augment defence supplies, the
government must seriously ponder whether the CAG report on defence preparedness must in future be released to the public or kept under
wraps in public security interests.
